Storage in the computer market currently revolves around two types of products -- the HDD and the SSD. The SSD is faster and requires less power to operate leading to better battery life in portable computers. The HDD offers lower cost and more storage capacity than the current SSDs.

A company called Fusion-io is offering a new product called the ioDrive Duo, which it claims to be the world's fastest and most innovative SSD. The company says that the product doubles the slot capacity of its PCI Express ioDrive storage solution.

The new ioDrive Duo offers what the company claims is previously unheard of levels of performance, capacity, and protection for a single server. The product claims to be able to scale from 6Gb/sec of read bandwidth and offer over 500,000 read IOPS when using four ioDrive Duos.

David Flynn from Fusion-io said in a statement, "Many database and system administrators are finding that SANs are too expensive and don’t meet performance, protection and capacity utilization expectations. This is why more and more application vendors are moving toward application-centric solid-state storage. The ioDrive Duo offers the enterprise the advantages of application-centric storage without application-specific programming."

The ioDrive Duo fits into PCI Express x8 or x16 slots and can sustain up to 20Gb/sec of raw throughput. The company also says that it can easily sustain 1.5Gb/sec of read bandwidth and nearly 200,000 read IOPS. Sustained read bandwidth is 1500 MB/sec, sustained write bandwidth is 1400 MB/sec, Read IOPS is 186,000, and write IOPS is 167,000.

The ioDrive Duo offers multi-bit error detection, correction and flash back protection offering chip level N+1 redundancy and on-board self-healing. The product can also be configured for RAID-1 mirroring between two ioMemory modules on the same ioDrive Duo PCIe card.

The new cards will be available in April 2009 with 160GB, 320GB, and 640GB. A 1.28TB version isn't coming until the second half of 2009. The typical SSD, like the SSD offerings from Intel, are sized like normal hard drives and connect via SATA and other enterprise connection standards.

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